My dad was an intelligent, honest, sober, hard-working man who loved his family fiercely. I want to make that clear, because in the cosmic father lottery I think I got lucky.

Dad’s biggest weakness was for conspiracy theories. Once on a trip across several states (he wouldn’t fly, but that’s another story) at every gas station he would loudly tell the attendant that this newfangled unleaded gas thing was part of a communist plot to gum up all of our car engines. My mother and I would cower in the car and pretend we were with somebody else.

I inherited my love for a good argument from him. He and I had epic arguments. I remember — this must have been fifty years ago, give or take — arguing with him that all firearms should be registered. And his response was that if all guns were registered, then when the communists took over (you may see a pattern here) they would know where to go to confiscate everyone’s guns. So I said they don’t need the government for that; they can take over the NRA headquarters and find the membership list. (Score!)

I thought of Dad this morning when I saw this article — How The NRA Built A Massive Secret Database Of Gun Owners.

… the sort of vast, secret database the NRA often warns of already exists, despite having been assembled largely without the knowledge or consent of gun owners. It is housed in the Virginia offices of the NRA itself. The country’s largest privately held database of current, former, and prospective gun owners is one of the powerful lobby’s secret weapons, expanding its influence well beyond its estimated 3 million members and bolstering its political supremacy.

That database has been built through years of acquiring gun permit registration lists from state and county offices, gathering names of new owners from the thousands of gun-safety classes taught by NRA-certified instructors and by buying lists of attendees of gun shows, subscribers to gun magazines and more, BuzzFeed has learned….

…The NRA won’t say how many names and what other personal information is in its database, but former NRA lobbyist Richard Feldman estimates they keep tabs on “tens of millions of people.”

So, if you are a gun owner, the NRA is watching you. And when the UN Agenda 21 infiltrators take over America, they can go straight to the NRA headquarters and know where to find you.

The article says gun owners are unlikely to care, because the data base isn’t in the hands of the government. But how do they know the NSA hasn’t hacked it already? Hmmmmmmm?

For that matter, how do we know the NRA isn’t a communist plot? Makes as much sense as anything else these days …